Sweeping Up Glass
By Carolyn Wall
Nineteen thirty eight is the coldest winter recorded in Aurora, Kentucky, but poverty has the greater grip. On a strip of icy mountain, Olivia Cross raises her grandson Will’m, runs a declining front room grocery store, and tolerates Ida, who lives on back of her land in a tarpaper shack. Ida is her mother, her ma’am, but Olivia says, “I thought if I stopped calling her ma’am, it would end her owning every last thing about me. It never did.”
Other than the boy Will’m, the one brilliant star in Olivia’s sky was her first and only true love, Wing Harris. However, for 25 years, she and Wing have exchanged nothing but howdies at Ruse’s Café. And now, up on the mountain, someone is mutilating Olivia’s Great Grandpap’s silver-faced wolves. She knows who the hunter is – but then learns he is also tied to her family’s darkest secrets. Worse – after fourteen years, Will’m’s mother has come back for him.
This 90,000 word novel takes a number of twists as Olivia and Will’m attempt to stop the Cotton Trials. But in order to do that, Olivia must decide who she will save in the damp belly of the earth.Excerpt from Sweeping Up Glass
Available in bookstores, from Random House, August 4, 2009 |